The Best Defense
Is to be Offensive
... or something like that
Somewhere on this web site, I have egotistically provided a copy of my master's thesis. "Ooh, pinch me!" you might say. Well, I might not blame you, because if you offered to show me your master's thesis, I would probably respond with some comment about it not being possible for me to care less. Still, writing and defending a thesis can be one of the more irritating jobs known to mankind. With that in mind, and as a sort of public service to those who may follow me, I figured I'd pass on a few pointers on how to successfully defend a thesis or dissertation. These are written specifically for the student of psychology, although I'm confident that they may be applicable elsewhere.
Don’t expect to find these pointers written down anywhere official. In fact, one of the goals of the process is to keep the poor student guessing, right up until the end. So, the best we can do is be lost together, or pass around these informal guidelines:
Use neologisms. In most places, they’re a sign of psychopathology, but at a university, they’re the basic currency of academia. Never say anything with a monosyllabic word when a multisyllabic word would create greater ambiguity. Make up as many as you can, because the fancier they sound, the less likely any of your committee members will be to admit that they haven’t the vaguest idea of what you’re talking about, which in turn means that they’ll be less likely to bother you with pesky questions.
Break all the rules of writing that you learned as an undergraduate. Write in third person, passive voice, using run-on sentences, referring tangentially to items defined later in the paper, and with a sentence and paragraph structure designed to obscure any logical thought, and constructed in such a way to defy any linear reading or interpretation.
Take all pre-defense reviews of your work seriously. I have found that by incorporating all the editorial suggestions I received, I was guaranteed a successful defense, because by the time we were done, my thesis didn’t have any of my own words in it anymore. It very accurately reflected the views and opinions of my committee members, which they obviously thought were brilliant. See point #2 above.
This tip comes with two caveats:
First, don’t assume that some day, you’ll get a draft back from review with no editing suggestions. It will inevitably reach a point where your committee members are instructing you to undo everything they asked you to do last time. Therefore, keep copies of all drafts. As soon as draft #N looks just like Draft #N-2, you’re done.
Second, don’t select any self-loathing faculty to be part of your committee. They hate anything they do, and by extension, will hate anything they tell you to do. Fortunately, they’re very difficult to find.
Theses and dissertations are not evaluated on the merits of their contents; they are graded by the pound. Use large fonts, wide margins, and triple-space. See #1 above.
Give your work a very long, technical title. If any of your committee can read all the way through the title without falling asleep at least once, you’re in very big trouble. See points #1 and #2 above.
Make lots of overhead transparencies, with lots of color graphs and diagrams. Flash is more important than substance (points #1, 4 and 5.) Make sure they contain as little text as possible (it would be very bad if your committee members sprained their lips from having to read too much).
It doesn’t matter what’s on the slide, as long as it looks impressive. You can even fish a slide from someone else’s defense out of the wastebasket and reuse it, as long as it’s in color, looks very impressive, and you can fabricate some brilliant interpretation that may (or may not) fit your data. It doesn’t matter what it shows (it can have lines going up, going down, going nowhere, or just lots of multicolored dots all over it), as long as you can make it sound as if it represents a finding so earth-shaking that they’ll be showing it on Nightline by the end of the week.
Don’t try to anticipate what the school will expect next; it only angers them. They have a zillion forms and procedures, and they’ll never reveal them to you ahead of time.
And, if you have any other questions... don’t ask.
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